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Recap of the Last Week and Then Some

A belated Happy St. Patrick’s Day and welcome to Spring. I took a few days vacation in New London, CT last week. We planned to go to the 2nd Annual St. Patrick’s Day parade but didn’t make it. We did see the parade last year.

Today we’re excited to release the final build of Internet Explorer 8 in 25 languages. IE8 makes what real people do on the web every day faster, easier, and safer. Anyone running Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server can get 32- and 64-bit versions now from http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. (Windows 7 users will receive an updated IE8 as part of the next Windows 7 milestone.)

Thank you to everyone who has provided the IE Team with feedback on IE8. Your dedication to making this product the best it can be is truly amazing. Here is an update on the feedback channels mentioned in IE8 Beta Feedback blog post back in March of 2008:

Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s latest version of the familiar web browser you are most comfortable using, helping you get everything you want from the web faster, easier, more privately and securely than ever before.

Windows 7

Hey folks, just wanted to provide another update (building on the recent post on some changes since Beta) on some of the changes you will see in the Release Candidate. Again, there are many and this is not an exhaustive list. Of course we continue to gather telemetry from the large number of people running the Beta full time. Just a reminder, the Beta is the only official build from Microsoft. Chaitanya compiled this list from a broad set of feature teams focused on visible changes based on feedback that go beyond “bug fixes”, though we included some of the more widely reported bugs on this list as well. –Steven

Rafael has done it again. And this is the perfect time to remind people that there is a huge difference between finding something that’s right there in the UI (as some have done with previous builds and tried to take credit for a "discovery") and delving into the underpinnings of the OS and making actual discoveries. This is the latter kind of discovery. The real kind.

The Windows Explorer has evolved by enabling you to find all sorts of content by searching for it. Many of you have used the search features in Windows Vista (based on our instrumented data) from the start menu or from the search box in Explorer. It has been a long time since most of us could remember where everything is by carefully managing our folder hierarchy and finding things based on file name alone. We often rely on domain specific search (in music players, mail clients, photo clients) but with Windows Vista and Windows 7 we make it possible to search within a namespace and across namespaces. This post is about a new feature based on Search that allows searching across PCs and even servers in an Enterprise setting. Alwin and Scott, program managers, and Brandon, a developer, on the “Find and Organize” feature team authored this post. –Steven

I’ve been using Windows 7 on several of my main systems for a while now and overall I’ve grown quite attached to it. But with every new OS comes a new learning curve, and one thing that I like to master are the new keyboard shortcuts.

The User State Migration Tool (USMT) for Windows 7 is now part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) and provides fast and flexible options to migrate user profiles and data from one operating system to another. Explore how the new Hard-Link Migration feature highlighted in his demonstration can dramatically reduce migration time for in-place operating system migration or computer refresh scenarios.

The Windows Troubleshooting Platform can reduce calls to the help desk by diagnosing and resolving common issues, and by providing built-in troubleshooters for several different types of problems including audio, video, and networking. Learn how to develop custom Windows Troubleshooting Packs using Windows PowerShell to help resolve issues commonly encountered in your environment.

User Account Control (UAC) was introduced in Windows Vista to help increase security and improve total cost of ownership by enabling the operating system to be deployed without administrative privileges. See how Windows 7 continues the investment in UAC with changes that enhance the user experience and put users in greater control of their prompting experience. For example, the number of operating system applications and tasks that require elevation is reduced, so standard users can do more than before and will see fewer elevation prompts.

DirectAccess enables remote users to access the corporate network anytime they have an Internet connection, without the extra step of initiating a virtual private networking (VPN) connection. Find out how to use DirectAccess to provide a more secure and flexible corporate network infrastructure in which computers on and off the network can remain healthy, managed, and updated.

The introduction of BranchCache in Windows 7 is the next step to improving end user productivity in branch offices. BranchCache caches content from remote file and Web servers in the branch location so that users can more quickly access this information. The cache can be hosted centrally on a server in the branch location, or can be distributed across user PCs.

Two months ago I published a simple method to display a SharePoint list in another site. A few days ago, Nathan posted the following comment: The one (minor) inconvenience I have found is that when you click the ID or Title field to navigate to the full record (dispform.aspx), the Close button will redirect you to the default […]

By popular request, we have packed up and created a download for the stencils that we used to create many of the SharePoint Technical Diagrams. These models are created using Office Visio 2007. You can modify the Visio files to illustrate how you plan to incorporate Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies in your own environment.

Security

"Aiming to better identify bugs that could lead to security issues, Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it planned to release a tool to help developers classify and assess program crashes. The tool, known as !exploitable and pronounced "bang exploitable," is a plugin for the Windows debugger that categorizes crash information using…

Project Management

This is a post or three that I have really been looking forward to writing, and it is a long time in the making for various reasons. Some of you, after reading it, will no doubt wonder if I have been taking magic mushrooms or something similar, but if the feedback from the SharePoint Best Practices conference is anything to go by, then maybe a couple of readers will have the same sense of realisation and clarity that I had.

So you would like to be able to quickly examine your project schedule to see which tasks your team should be working on this week…or…maybe you would like to see which tasks you should work on next week. The following is a dynamic approach, quick to implement, and will meet this need.

Miscellaneous

The quarter is winding down at Stanford, and my course assistants and I are busy grading some very creative final exams. In my course "Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach," I give the students the final exam question on the first day of class, and it is due the last day. It is, "Design the ideal organization. Use course concepts to defend your answer."

…

What is your ideal organization? You don’t have to use all 3000 words — in fact 25 words or less might be most fun. There are hints about aspects of my ideal organization that go beyond The No Asshole Rule on my list of "15 Things I Believe." But if I forced myself to stay under 25 words, I would say something like:

Like this:

Related

Steve Mullen has been involved in information technology for over 35 years. He is also actively involved in the music program (voice and English hand bells) and Vestry of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Damascus, MD.

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